


Paper Bag

by veryvincible



Category: Marvel 616
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Blood TW (minor), Emotional Manipulation, Hallucinations, Hydra Cap, M/M, Repetition and Repetitive Language, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-19
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:54:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28167330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veryvincible/pseuds/veryvincible
Summary: His gaze lands on something creeping out from the almost-shadows. There’s one tendril pressed into the wall like a brand, only slightly darker than everything else. Then another tendril. It’s not until they’re parallel to the symbol itself that Tony recognizes the icon before him.Something shifts in his chest. His eyes widen a smidge, and though he feels his hands shaking, he looks down to find the suit gauntlets situated perfectly still at his sides.Tony hears crinkling behind him— the crinkling of a paper bag, presumably brown, and presumably housing two sesame seed bagels. He pauses to look back, and there stands Steve.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark (Implied)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 13
Collections: 2020 Captain America/Iron Man Holiday Exchange





	Paper Bag

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ghosthan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghosthan/gifts).



0103.

The room is empty.

The camera is situated up toward the ceiling, nestled into one of the corners and pointing downward toward the empty room. There’s a pleasant sort of static alongside the sight, a perfect auditory accompaniment to the nothingness of it all. There are no other rooms and there are no other noises.

It’s just this.

It’s just static.

Tony listens to the static. Tony watches the room.

Steve enters the room.

In his hand is a bag, which contains a bagel.

He sets the bag down, leaving his hands free to take a cup from the cupboard. He pauses to get a drink of water.

No.

Steve enters the kitchen, carrying a bag— an unlabeled paper bag— which contains a bagel. He sets the bag down on the kitchen counter in favor of taking a cup from the cupboard. He’s parched. He gets himself a drink of water.

It’s not real yet.

It doesn’t feel real yet.

The room— the kitchen— is tidy enough, neat and clean as Tony remembers it. The cupboards are wooden, the edges of their doors round in an old fashioned sort of way. There’s no color to them- none Tony can see through the camera, at the very least- but he remembers the style of wood being darker than average. Maybe there was a cherry tint to them at some point, something rich and classic. Despite the nigh objective irrelevance of the detail, Tony finds himself stuck on the thought.

What color are the cupboards?

_ It’s alright _ , he tells himself and he doesn’t. It’s a feeling more than anything, a milli-milli-millisecond of a sentiment forcing him to push further, to paint the picture he’d like to paint and focus on the corrections later on. There’s no incentive— no pull factor, at the very least. There’s simply the acknowledgment of the fact that he can do this or he can do nothing, and something in him loathes the idea of doing nothing. He can’t remember the last time he did nothing, but somehow, it feels like all he’s ever done.

The countertops are marbled, as is the top of the kitchen island. The refrigerator is nestled into an area cut out for itself, smooth against the wall. It’s stainless steel, matching the sink, matching the handles of the cupboards, matching the light fixtures on the ceiling, matching… just matching. It all ties together. It was intended to tie together. Everything does, in the end.

Steve enters.

Steve enters the room, which is the kitchen, at 7:30 in the morning. He’s been out for quite some time. His hair sticks to his forehead with sweat, and in his hand is a paper bag— brown, presumably, but there’s no way for Tony to know— with its top crumpling under the stress of his grip. He runs a hand through his hair, his chest rising and falling in slightly shorter bursts than usual. It’s a shift so slight, in fact, that Tony would never have been able to catch it all that time ago. He sets the bag— no, tosses the bag onto the kitchen island. It’s a gentle toss, certainly, but it’s a toss nonetheless. Tony can tell in the way that it slides ever so slightly across the surface, stopping inches away from the spot on which it made contact.

Inside the bag, presumably, are two sesame seed bagels. It’s an unlabeled bag, but it’s an unlabeled bag from the same place Steve gets all of his other bagels and all of his other unlabeled bags; at this point, Tony thinks, the plainness of the bag and what everyone’s come to associate with it (which is, of course, bagels— the finest bagels in the city, according to Steve) have served as pseudo-advertisements of their own.

Steve sets the bag down— no, tosses the bag— to free his hands up, of course. And Steve frees up his hands so he’s able to open the cupboard door, rough fingers wrapping around those stainless steel handles and tugging a little sharply, a practiced movement to free the door from the magnetic seal keeping it stuck to the cupboard’s frame.

There are taller glasses and there are shorter glasses. They’re similar enough in width that people often work under the assumption that a shorter glass would contain less liquid and a taller glass more, but the key word is similar. The shorter glasses are still a tad bit wider, both at the bottom and at the top. On top of that, the shorter glasses are ever so slightly thinner in material than the taller glasses. The difference in the amount of liquid they hold is marginal at best.

Steve takes a taller glass. Every single time.

He’s six foot two. His skin is light, neutral but prone to some kind of tone unlike other kinds of tones (”pinkness”, Tony remembers, but he can’t quite picture what that means anymore). His hair is only a few shades darker, a bright sort of shade that Tony doesn’t see too terribly often. His eyes are blue— deep blue, the way the ocean is, the way rainboots and whales colored by children are, the way the sky is as the sun sets. They crinkle slightly at the edges.

His expression is neutral. He’s alone.

He shouldn’t be alone.

Tony can fix that. He can fix that. He’d really, really like to fix that.

But it’s still not right, is it? It’s close— so close— some superficial reenactment of life that only goes skin deep. Tony can fix that first, can’t he? He can fix all of it. He has all the time in the world.

He knows what’s in the cupboards. He places plates and bowls lovingly upon the shelves,”installs” wiring behind every light switch and outlet, puts a light in the fridge and stocks the freezer, imagines the imperfect and textured layers of wood and marbling in every piece of decor. He peels back every layer of every single thing present until he knows the whole scene inside and out— quite literally.

And his eyes (as he’s become so accustomed to this state of being that the security camera is practically the same thing they always were) land on Steve.

Skin deep. It only goes skin deep.

Tony can fix that.

Layer by layer, he picks Steve apart. It’s not satisfying in the slightest; the process isn’t, at the very least. He pricks off every hair. He peels back the skin in layers. He takes note of the flexing muscles, the pumping of blood through Steve’s veins.

_ In. Out. _

Steve’s breathing just fine. It’s a curious sight, a human so functional yet so compromised. He chalks it up to the wonders of the imagination and moves on.

Just like that, he continues to double-check every layer of every model in the room, right down to the atom.

There. It’s real enough now, isn’t it?

Tony enters, looking about as Tony-like as Tony thinks he looks like. It’s an image of himself he can’t quite bear to look at for so long.

He doesn’t care to describe it. If he hadn’t been able to default so easily to this image, this amalgamation of features he’s decided are most representative of himself, he might not place a Tony in this dollhouse of his at all. But it is easy, unfortunately, and in Tony goes. He’s some height. He has two eyes, he has dark hair, he’s tall in almost the same way Steve is, and his shoulders aren’t quite as broad. He’s a man. He has a name. He has a voice.

Tony— a man with a height, all the facial features you’d expect, hair on his head, four limbs and their respective extremities, a torso, a neck, and all else that’s usual— enters. In the kitchen, then, there are two figures.

Steve and Tony.

They look good together, Tony thinks. They complement each other.

. . .

On with the scene.

Steve looks up in the direction of the doorway. He looks up in the direction of the doorway. 

Tilt his head just two centimeters. Make it clearer. Make him look at Tony.

_ I can make him look at me. _

Steve looks vaguely in the direction of Tony.

He says—

What will he say?

“Tony.”

That’s not right. His lips didn’t move. Tony hadn’t even wanted him to say it; was he so desperate that his subconscious stepped in for him so soon after the question was asked, or was it something else?

“What are you doing?”

Steve’s lips still aren’t moving.

Maybe it’s not Steve talking.

He can hear it, sometimes. Himself. His thoughts, his internal monologue— he can hear it all if he dissociates enough from the reality he’s become accustomed to (and, at times, the realities he builds for himself). They sound like voices. Not his, necessarily, but voices.

If you asked him to describe them, he wouldn’t be able to.

He has all this processing power, all this time, all these trains of thought ready to leave their stations, and he still hasn’t taken the fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second it would take to define them more clearly.

He’s not going to.

On with the scene.

What does Steve say?

“Tony.”

Stop it. That’s not right.

“Enough.”

Steve enters the room.

In the kitchen, then, there are three figures.

0103.

* * *

Tony’s not certain what to make of it at first. He takes in the sight of this new (new?) Steve, and it’s… eerie.

It’s like hearing an old favorite of a song play so faintly that only the s’s and t’s are pronounced enough to note. It’s like catching just enough of that song— a song you know well, forward and back— to sing along beat despite this. It’s a whisper of a memory he used to be able to recall so vividly, a whisper he can describe in depth as if experiencing it all for the first time (the reason being, of course, that he’s described it so many times before— it may as well be a game of telephone with a version of himself who’s more him than he is).

It’s a man he met once when he was younger. This man pulled him out of a rut he’d dug for himself; he’d been a helping hand and more, perhaps. It’s his face, which Tony hadn’t seen in so long, reflected back in the mirror on both his darkest days and his brightest. It’s his voice in Tony’s head. This man he can’t remember is speaking to him, and he’s speaking back his half of a practiced conversation he hasn’t had in years, decades, centuries.

This is a song he hasn’t heard in quite some time, a memory he can’t remember. This is a man he may never see again.

Yet, with great confidence, Tony notes:

His eyes are the wrong color.

Tony’s entranced by it for a moment, but he manages to pull his gaze away from that wicked, almost toxic shade of green long enough to glance down at Steve’s watch.

0104.

Ah. Well.

“You can come out, now,” Steve says, and everything goes dark.

* * *

When Tony wakes up

When Tony opens his

When Tony is able to see again, it’s from a different perspective. He’s eye level with Steve, now, and there’s only one Steve to be eye level with. He glances down to find he’s in the suit once more, and though it’s a hollow, empty feeling, he’s able to clench and unclench his fists again. He can shift his weight again. He can twist and turn again.

He looks back up. Steve is still staring at him with those strangely colored eyes, two drops of a vitriolic blue-green he’s never seen before. He turns to survey the rest of the room, and much like it was before (Tony thinks, at least, but the memory is hazy and far away), it’s barren. There’s only one item of importance in the entirety of the damn place, and it’s a security camera— a small, old-ish security camera— staring back at him from the corner of the room.

“Come on,” Steve says.

Tony hears his own voice from a spot below his eyes— the cameras. 

“Where are we going?”

“Office,” Steve responds, starting their trek toward the place. Tony’s about to make a note of how terribly robotic Steve sounds when Steve turns to make eye contact (ish) with him, brows turned inward and smile a little awkward. Something blossoms deep in the heart— not-heart— of Tony’s chest— chest plate. It’s sickly sweet and not quite warm. “I really am sorry about that.”

“Sorry about what?” asks what must be his own voice again.

“We won’t have to do that again, will we?”

There’s something not-quite-curious, not-quite-demanding in his tone.  _ We won’t have to _ , Steve said.  _ Will we? _ Steve asked. Implying he was pushed. Implying Tony’s in control. Implying a number of things, none of them particularly nice to consider.

“No,” Tony answers. It’s as close to a lie as he can get without lying outright. What is it, exactly, that he did? There’s no memory of it stored away. There’s nothing.

_ Will we? _ Steve asked.

_ Will we? _ Tony asks, now.

Though troubled, he follows Steve’s footsteps closely. His eyes-not-eyes are stuck on the back of Steve’s head at first, his gaze traveling down Steve’s body in anything but an appreciative manner. It’s uncomfortable, feeling so… uncomfortable with him. From the straightness of his stance to the odd, clipped neatness of every step he takes, the man seems almost  _ grotesquely _ unflawed. Well, with the exception of those eyes, of course.

Tony musters up the courage to look away from the man, and that’s new too, isn’t it? He’s normally so able to look at whatever he’d like whenever he’d like— when did it get this difficult to spread his focus? Everything is off, just off enough that anyone would be remiss to refuse further examination.

The halls are long. Tall. There’s a ceremonial feel to them, almost, and Tony thinks he could have guessed that from the  _ click, click, click _ of Steve’s shoes against the floor alone. That’s funny— Tony thought Steve would have preferred something quieter, something more utilitarian.

There’s quite a bit about the place that’s funny, actually.

The windows are blacked out. It’s not quite bright, but not too terribly dim. Tony can make out every shape and shadow, but the colors are lost on him.

His gaze lands on something creeping out from the almost-shadows. There’s one tendril pressed into the wall like a brand, only slightly darker than everything else. Then another tendril. It’s not until they’re parallel to the symbol itself that Tony recognizes the icon before him.

Something shifts in his chest. His eyes widen a smidge, and though he feels his hands shaking, he looks down to find the suit gauntlets situated perfectly still at his sides.

Tony hears crinkling behind him— the crinkling of a paper bag, presumably brown, and presumably housing two sesame seed bagels. He pauses to look back, and there stands Steve.

He’s six foot two. His skin is light, neutral but prone to some kind of tone unlike other kinds of tones. His hair is only a few shades darker, a bright sort of shade that Tony doesn’t see too terribly often. His eyes are blue— deep blue, the way the ocean is, the way rainboots and whales colored by children are, the way the sky is as the sun sets. They crinkle slightly at the edges.

Steve smiles.

The tightness in Tony’s chest dissipates.


End file.
